Virtual
means the quality of affecting something without actually being that something
and the concept Culture can be defined as the cumulative deposit of knowledge,
experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions
of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material
objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of
generations through individual and group striving. Culture is the communication
and communication is culture, it is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large
group of people.
Virtual culture as the culture that has emerged or is emerged
from the use of computer networks for communication, entertainment and
business. It is also the study of various social phenomena associated with the
internet and other new forms of network communication such as online
communities, online multi player gaming and text messaging. ( Jones. S. 1997)
Therefore
in simple understanding Virtual culture can be referred as the culture which
emerged or introduced because of the development of digital age/ new media/ uniformities
age whereby now people of the certain society or world interact through social
media such as Skype, twitter, Facebook, email, world wide web (w.w.w) and
whatsapp.
Within
virtual culture there is a certain society formed which known as a virtual
community. Virtual community is a social aggregation that emerges from the Net
when enough people carry on public discussion long enough with sufficient human
feeling to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace (Gibson, 2003). In other words the
term Virtual Community can be expressed as the group of people who may not meet
one another face to face and who exchange worlds and ideas through the
mediation of computer bulletin boards and networks.
Howards.
R. (1993) argued that, in a cyberspace people always chat, argue, engage in
intellectual discourse, and perform acts of commerce, exchange knowledge, share
emotional support, make plans and brainstorm. All of these issues are done by
people when they get together and they do it with words on computer screens,
through the communication people built communities where by identities
commingle and interact electronically.
In
the virtual community there is the formation of cyberspace whereby it’s defined
as the electronic medium of computer networks in which online communication
takes place.
........By Faith Gabriella.
